A three-minute film seen entirely through rings of cut paper — part camera iris, part excavation section. It opens on a locked site and ends with the community walking onto it.
Archaeology usually arrives at a site from the outside. Specialists come in, the ground is fenced, findings leave in boxes, and the people who live beside the ruin are described in the report rather than consulted about it. Marcone’s work is about reversing that: designing heritage sites with the communities around them, and treating the pre-colonial and colonial landscapes as one continuous thing rather than two separate periods.
The Dan David Prize selection committee praised “Marcone’s transformative approach to archaeology that prioritizes the co-design of heritage sites with local stakeholders, and for scholarship that transcends typical chronological boundaries, revealing the deep continuities between the pre-colonial and colonial landscapes.”
The film puts its argument in the shape of the frame rather than in narration. The tools of the discipline — trowel, sherd, map, compass — sit outside the circle, on the table, never inside the thing being looked at. And early on, what the rings reveal is a locked gate.
Every image arrives through concentric rings of cut paper that open and close around it. They read two ways at once, and both are true: the iris of a lens deciding what may be looked at, and a stratigraphic section — the layers you dig down through to reach a site.
A trowel, a sherd, a map, a compass — laid around the rim, never within the view. The discipline is the apparatus you look through, not the place itself.
The site opens to the people credentialled to enter it. Everyone else is on this side of the bars, looking in.
The circle divides. On one side, archaeologists in white climbing the steps of the monument. On the other, the community in red, dancing. The same place, two worlds, a line drawn down the middle of it. This is the problem the whole film is about, stated without a single word.
Co-design is an idea that resists illustration. Explain it and you get a diagram; dramatise it and you get a ceremony. So the film does neither. It takes the one image it has been using all along — a circular view controlled by a gate — and it opens the gate.
In the second half the hands change. A local hand takes hold of the map alongside the others. The figure in the red poncho moves from behind the bars to inside the frame. Then a whole crowd — musicians, women in bright skirts, families — comes through the gate and up onto the site, and the bars are simply gone. The last thing the rings show before they close is the monument full of people.
The detail we care about most: the community never appears as a subject of study. They appear as the people holding the map.
The map stops being an instrument that one side reads about the other. It becomes the thing they are both holding.
Musicians, families, colour. Not visitors admitted to a monument — people arriving at a place that was theirs.
The last image the film lets through is the site with everybody on it. The layers fold back over, which is the other thing the rings were always about: this is one continuous landscape, and we are only ever looking at a section of it.
Giancarlo Marcone Flores is an archaeologist of the Peruvian central coast and Director of the Department of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at UTEC, the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología in Lima. His research runs from late pre-Hispanic political and domestic economies and the lomas fog-oasis settlements of the Lurín valley to the way Inca infrastructure still shapes the roads in use today — alongside heritage work on participatory management with communities that are usually left out of it.
Each year the Foundation selects its winners and, with the help of the laureate, chooses the subject of the film they are being honored for. The Foundation’s team, who know that work intimately, help bring it to the page, and we turn it into script, image, register, and motion.
The one thing we keep from them is the film itself. It is made in their honor but held back, so that the first time Giancarlo Marcone meets it, in animated form, is the evening of the prize — the very moment they are being celebrated for the work it depicts. That is the part of the project we love: a film that is also a gift, a surprise, revealed in the room where it does its work.
The Dan David films don’t end their life on the evening of the prize. After the ceremony they travel to YouTube and to the Foundation’s own website, where each one sits alongside the committee’s reasoning for choosing the laureate and further material on the research. The winners are interviewed once the films are public, and those interviews are woven into the published versions.
You care about your subject.
So do we.
Client: Dan David Foundation
Subject: Giancarlo Marcone Flores, UTEC, Lima
Direction: Daniella Koffler
Animation: Moofa Animation Team
Year: 2026